NEW YORK (AP) — Elza van den Heever’s portrayal of Salome sticks to her when she leaves the Metropolitan Opera for a rented condominium on Manhattan’s Higher West Aspect.
“Every night I wake up with the most disturbing nightmares, just random things that I dream and feel so real,” the South African soprano mentioned. “There’s just a tinge of darkness that’s lying in my subconscious at the moment, and I wake up in a pool of sweat every single night with very, very weird, very strange things that I dream.”
Claus Guth’s intense and disturbing manufacturing of “Salome” opens Tuesday night time and runs by Could 24, the Met’s first new staging since 2004 of Strauss’ adaptation of an Oscar Wilde play. The Could 17 efficiency might be televised to theaters worldwide.
Based mostly on the biblical story of the Jewish princess who was the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, “Salome” provoked a scandalous response to its 1905 premiere. It’s best recognized for the seductive dance of the seven veils that the princess performs for her lecherous stepfather in alternate for a present of her selecting: the top of St. John the Baptist on a silver platter.
Physique doubles present a shattered psyche
An acclaimed German director making his Met debut at age 61, Guth updates the setting to Victorian time and dietary supplements Salome with six physique doubles at varied levels of youth, in black velvet clothes with white lace surrounding the neck and black bows. Guth needed them to resemble organ pipes when standing collectively. Their clean expressions call to mind the Grady twins haunting the Overlook Resort in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”
“It’s one of my favorite movies,” Guth mentioned. “Unconscious, I probably took something from there.”
Guth’s staging was first introduced by the Met in 2017 as a coproduction with Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre starring Anna Netrebko. It debuted on the Bolshoi in 2021 with Asmik Grigorian, after Netrebko determined the position wasn’t proper for her, and was to open the Met’s 2021-22 season solely to be pushed again due to the pandemic. Russia’s assault on Ukraine prompted the Met to construct its personal units.
Earlier than Strauss’ opening notice, a video of a younger Salome is projected as a prerecorded celesta performs, evoking a music field. The set features a doll, a stuffed animal and a interest horse. Throughout the dance, a Herod physique double sporting a masks mixing ram and human within the fashion of Picasso pairs with every Salome in ascending age to undertaking levels of abuse that left her irreparably scarred as she collapses.
“I definitely view it as fragments of memories that are being reconstructed by a brain that has been abused and tortured,” van den Heever mentioned. “His perversity just overwhelms her. … You see the way that Herod grooms the first three in particular and how his behavior becomes more violent and more cruel with the last three.”
Gerhard Siegel, the precise Herod, watches from a brief distance as his lifetime of exploitation is depicted.
“What’s happening on stage is revolting, however, the power of it is that the music is just so beautiful it becomes even more beautiful when the actions on stage are more revolting,” Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin mentioned. “So that contrast should make people uncomfortable and if we do it right, yes, they should be shocked.”
Working collectively for first time in 17 years
Van den Heever greeted Guth with a hug when rehearsals began final month and informed him: “I’ve been looking forward to this for years.” Now 45, she final labored with Guth when he directed her 2008 European debut as Giorgetta in Puccini’s “Il Tabarro” at Oper Frankfurt.
“I was 100% in love from the very first moment we worked together. I think we’re a match made in heaven,” she mentioned. “I just remember it being eye-opening, this world of regietheatre. I was scared of it because at the time everybody’s always talking about, quote ‘Eurotrash’ and that scares you because you think, oh my God, what am I going to encounter? And it wasn’t like that at all.”
Salome debut three years in the past
Van den Heever made her Salome position debut within the 2022 Paris Opéra staging by Lydia Steier that remodeled the dance right into a gang rape.
“The first couple of weeks I was really struggling,” she mentioned. “It was hard for me to find my voice within her concept, but once I did, I was 100% and I think the performance speaks for itself. That’s not me being forced to do things that I don’t want to do. That was me 100% in the concept and in the role as she envisioned it and doing it with full confidence and conviction. It was difficult to get there, but once I got there I was extremely proud of the work we did.”
Variations are clear to her.
“They’re both equally dark and disturbing,” van den Heever mentioned, “except Lydia’s was definitely more a visceral experience, whereas Claus’ is more a psychological experience.”
Symbolic sculpture
Throughout a climactic scene, Salome pushes over a 250-pound, 7-foot statue that shatters on the stage, making a mud cloud.
Gloria Solar, head of prop on the Met’s development store, led 4 folks creating 16 plaster statues crammed with burlap — one will get destroyed throughout every stage rehearsal and efficiency. The crew has given every a reputation, beginning with Adam, Benjamin, Cain and Daniel. For opening night time, Hamilton will get shattered.
“This is a moment that maybe shocks everybody,” Solar mentioned
On the remaining gown rehearsal final week, van den Heever was so overcome that her eyes teared when the viewers applauded her in the course of the curtain name.
“It’s pretty clear that we’re dealing with a very, very messed up situation,” she mentioned. “And it is perverse and it is cruel and it is psychologically very twisted. I think if we leave people comfortable at the end of the show, that means we didn’t do our job very well.”
